Pete Hamill
Pete Hamill
Pete Hamillis an American journalist, novelist, essayist, editor and educator. Widely traveled and having written on a broad range of topics, he is perhaps best known for his career as a New York City journalist, as "the author of columns that sought to capture the particular flavors of New York City's politics and sports and the particular pathos of its crime." Hamill was a columnist and editor for the New York Post and The New York Daily News...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth24 June 1935
CountryUnited States of America
He became out of step with the basic audience, because they didn't believe it. And I think that was the beginning of the end of Winchell. I think it was a self-inflicted wound.
New Yorkers, in general, love disaster. They love blizzards, power failures, etc. (I don't mean that they loved September 11.) A shared disaster brings them together more - ethnically, racially - because the disaster affects almost all of them, making no distinctions. Their manners are generally very good indeed. And their generosity can be without limits.
He steps on stage and draws the sword of rhetoric, and when he is through, someone is lying wounded and thousands of others are either angry or consoled.
It's a good demonstration of will for any terrorist outfit to consider. If they knocked out every subway line and all the bus terminals, New Yorkers would leave the house, moaning, and find their way to work. That's our tribe.
This is truly marvelous work: full of mystery, nostalgia, joy, The Color of Whimsy.
One great example of the way Tweed really helped the Irish was when the water started to overflow from the Croton Reservoir, it went to certain parts of Manhattan but not to where the poor lived. The mythology of the dirty Irish developed because they had no water, not until Tweed, through aggravation or bribery, got the water to flow through poor neighborhoods.
He was a very quiet guy, unlike the rest of the rabble, ... He had a low-key, wicked sense of humor. I had no idea that he was writing anything until someone called me up and said, 'Frank McCourt's written this amazing book,' which turned out to be 'Angela's Ashes.'
If you're going to write about things that are as old as mankind, you've got to find a new, fresh way to write about them, to make people interested. Winchell found a way.
What libraries give you is all three tenses - the past tense - the present tense in which we live and the future that we can only imagine. These places have teachers who are living and dead and we are lucky to have them. If I sit here and read Aristotle, he is speaking to me across a thousand years - more than a thousand years. That sense that I am in the company of the great greatest people who ever lived is a humbling experience but a liberating experience.
Human beings want to know too much abut each other, and that's why there are so many lies.
This is truly marvelous work full of mystery, nostalgia, joy, The Color of Whimsy.
It's odd being an American now. Most of us are peaceful, but here we are again, in our fifth major war of this century.
He tried to imagine the sound of the color red.
Say what you will about him Ed Koch is still the best show in town.